The real problem underlying the authorities’ attempt to control the soldiers’ encounters with prostitutes lay in the fact that, in spite of all the regulations reviewed in this and previous chapters aiming at forbidding the soldiers from mingling with the local population and at creating formidable boundaries around the barracks and training camps, the men continued to filter through to the surrounding areas. Although the military and health authorities wanted to have tight control over the soldiers’ bodies, a control that is graphically represented by the policy of segregation and internment in the camps, the soldiers were always crossing the supposedly insurmountable boundaries enclosing their camps. These simple acts of negotiating and crossing boundaries, even though they were not as dramatic as desertion (which will be dealt with in the next chapter), were still quite alarming, for they undermined the whole logic of the modern army, a logic that saw the best way of disciplining and training an army in isolating it from the wider society and in drawing sharp distinctions between civilian and military lives.

XREF: Builds directly on earlier highlights about soldiers crossing supposedly permeable boundaries (loc 1108-1109) and the incompleteness of disciplinary power. Builds on: "Ordinary soldiers perpetually crossed supposedly impermeable camp boundaries."

Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed…, loc. 1171